Transit Matters If You Want To Climb The Income Ladder

posted by Gloria Ohland | 245mp
June 09, 2015

As Los Angeles County gears up its transit construction program and contemplates another county sales tax measure to help build even more transit, advocates, elected officials and neighborhoods continue to debate which transportation investments to make, and whether the beneficiaries will be the rich or the poor. This makes a recent post on The New York Times"Upshot" website particularly interesting: It refers to an ongoing Harvard study on the factors that predict whether a low-income family will escape from poverty, which has found that commute time is the single strongest factor – the longer the average commute, the worse the chances that a family will be able to move up the economic ladder.

Mikayla Bouchard writes that the study finds a lack of reliable and efficient transportation is a huge barrier to social mobility, and that “The relationship between transportation and social mobility is stronger than . . . several other factors, like crime, elementary-school test scores, or the percentage of two-parent families in a community.”